E​RCOFTAC Workshop

Turbulent Energy Transfer in Space Plasmas

29th - 31st August 2023

Ecole Centrale de Lyon in Écully - France

https://turb-space.sciencesconf.org

D​escription:

The 99% of the visible universe is made of plasma, a gas of charged particles known as the "fourth state" of the matter, in addition to the solid, liquid and ordinary gas state. Plasma flows are ubiquitous in nature - pervading the Earth's environment through the interplanetary space - while hot and cold plasmas are operated every day in research, industrial and public facilities, with state of the art plasma technologies being already at the base of modern fusion reactors, aerospace engineering, navigation and telecommunications infrastructures.

Advancing fundamental research on plasmas it is therefore critical to support the development of sectors which are strategic at national and international level and to underpin the many technological applications of plasmas, such as the development of devices for the production of clean nuclear energy, or the implementation of models for the so called "space weather", which is becoming critical given our growing dependence from satellite communications. France has currently a leading role in the construction of the world's largest magnetic confinement plasma physics experiment, the International Thermonuclear Experimental Reactor (ITER), a tokamak nuclear fusion reactor that is being built next to the Cadarache facility in Saint-Paul-les-Durance. The Centre National d'Etudes Spatiales (CNES) and the CNRS are instead involved in several missions for the investigation of non-linear dynamics in complex plasmas in the outer space and the development of models to predict the effects of their coupling with the Earth's magnetosphere.

The French academic community as whole has highly recognized poles of excellence where fundamental and applied research on plasmas has been driving in recent years the fallout of society­ beneficial breakthrough technologies and where generations of scientists and engineers have been trained to work in the private industry as well as civil servants. The Universite de Lyon with some of its institutional partners, in particular the Ecole Centrale de Lyon (ECL), the Ecole Normale de Lyon (ENS), the CNRS, the Univ. Lyonl, the INSA de Lyon, the Centre de Recherche Astrophysique de Lyon (CRAL) and the Laboratoire de Mecanique des Fluides et d'Acoustique, has the ambition to become one of such poles.

It is in this context that we propose a workshop that will gather in Lyon scientists and experts on fundamental and space plasmas, working on novel theoretical modeling and numerical methods for the understanding of the dynamics of the interplanetary medium and the external Earth's environment.

The workshop will be supported by SIG35 and SIG50, as well as the Pilot Center Henri Benard.